LEDs are commonly used in nearly all environments and applications requiring traditional lighting. In fact, LEDs are now more readily accepted as general lighting sources and viable replacements for traditional lighting technologies such as incandescent and fluorescent technologies etc. For example, LEDs are routinely used as replacements for neon lighting systems, and in purely aesthetic applications, such as building exterior accent lighting designs.
Many factors contribute to the increased usage of LEDs, such as higher energy savings, better quality lighting design, extended operating life, along with many others. One limitation, however, continuing to restrict the use of LEDs, especially an aesthetic applications, is the rigidity of many LED lighting designs. For example, traditional LED lighting designs have limited utility in contour applications because of a lack of flexibility and inability to bend along multiple axes.
One conventional LED design includes LED strips formed of flexible PCBs (FPCs). In these conventional designs, LEDs are mounted atop a flexible PCB, then overlaid with other structural component to create a linear path. For example, the resulting flexible LED strip can be viewed as a flexible ruler, bendable up and down along a single axis. This ruler (i.e., flexible strip), however, cannot be easily bent from side to side. As such, this particular flexible LED strip is only bendable along a single axis.
Thus, conventional flexible LED strips might be suitable as accent lighting bending around a corner of a building's exterior façade. This conventional flexible LED strip, however, is suboptimal when required to also twist down an edge or the corner of the building, or follow more complex curves.
To be suitable for the flexing on an agile corner of the building, or deforming to provide more complex curves, this conventional flexible LED strip would need to be twisted in some way, or cut into small pieces. Thus, these conventional LED strips are suitable in this aesthetic application only when it's required to flex or deform along a single axis.
Other conventional approaches include groups of two LED modules mounted on a small but relatively rigid PCB strip. In addition to the two LED modules, each of these PCB strips includes additional electronics. A single wire, or a bundle of twisted wires, interconnects each of the modules and are pre-shaped in three-dimension (3-D) to provide multi-access flexibility. The PCB strip, LEDs, and other electronics are placed into a mold and covered with silicon in a final manufacturing stage. As understood by those of skill in the art, these other conventional approaches can add significant expense and complexity to the PCB strip and the LED module design.